


Burdened With Glorious Purpose

by Zagzagael



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-23
Updated: 2013-08-23
Packaged: 2017-12-24 10:02:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/938639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zagzagael/pseuds/Zagzagael
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the prompt:  Loki, just before he lifts Mjolnir.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Burdened With Glorious Purpose

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nickygabriel](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=nickygabriel).



This is the way it had begun.

Born of ice, flesh of blue, cold-hearted even in the womb. Out of one of the nine worlds I was taken, not wrenched but swaddled and held tight, carried as though glass. Odin knew then of the depth hoar, the rime, the black ice, the freeze that could destroy. Would destroy. He had always known.

One babe was already feeding at the breast of our mother, his hunger perhaps more apparent than mine. I had to be sustained on the tit of the coerced, the simple, the unloving. My thirst was never quenched. But when I was held in the arms of Father, the arms of Mother; I learned to fall asleep counting the heart beats of the gods.

And when I was laid in the cradle beside my brother, the dew that wet his brow chilled mine with frost.

I learned of this later, much later. But this is how I remember it now.

***

This is the way it began.

Mjolnir. In the forge of the dwarves. The crusher, the grinder. That which smashes. The only weapon ever to be able to be used victorious against the God-Devourer.

The hammer transformed from the heart of a dying star - so says Father - in an enchanted smithy. The forging that slew the dinosaurs of Midgard when it was tempered, the explosive transformation from core to weapon so intense the sound of its thunderous destruction echoed through the universe for countless days and nights.

I disagree.

The Allfather would very much like to believe the twisted tale he tells. The bastardization of the cosmogony of the hammer. It was I, Loki, who commissioned the creation of this weapon. Instigated when I took shears to Sif, shorn bald and revealed as the plain gash she is and Thor thundered in his rage and embarrassment. He could not bear to look upon her and I delighted in this until they forced me to ply new locks out of the dastardly dwarves. But the game was on and gods older and far more clever than myself devised the play so that it was I who actualized the making of the tool that would destroy my own true father at the hands of my foster-Allfather. Yes, Mjolnir swung towards Laufey and performed its fated duty in the hand of Odin.

That is the tale of Loki Laufeyson and how his mischief visited death upon his own creator. I tell it with my mouth torn ragged - do not forget that it was my lips sewn shut as punishment for being bold enough to challenge a dwarf. The duel of skill that brought forth this hammer of the gods.

Am I not an Aesir god? Can I not rightly heft this tool, designed for delivering repeated blows? The hammer that I caused to be crafted? Does it not in its way belong to me? If the handle were longer, surely I could, with both arms, lift the sledge and wield the weapon of my Father and my brother.

The history of Mjolnir is the history of Thor, but it is also the midwife of my own rebirth as the son of Odin.

Yes, Mjolnir tempts me, calls to me, in the voice of the uru metal from which it was crafted, with the blooded head that has destroyed worlds and lives and my own father. The whispered inscription, Odin’s very voice enough to carve the cheek.

_"Whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor."_

I am deserving if not honorable. Valuable if not meritorious. Let me be worthy. I want to possess everything.

Something in this wanting is driving me mad. I have become the true offspring of my maiden aunts, the Norns. My fated existence fraught. My tangled destiny knotted.

***

This is the way it begins.

The casting out of Thor.

The action which opened the new door through which I stepped was the passage I spelled for the Jotunheim on the day of Thor’s coronation. Even in my cunning ingenuity, the perspicacity of my actions is shaped in the dark recesses of my mind. Although skilled diabolist trickster, I am not seer. Once set in motion, the gears I have warped find their own teeth and I, as much as the next, delight or despair in the revelation of the grinding machine.

And oh what magnificent disgrace resulted! And yet....

With all trials and tribulations, wearying parts must be endured to allow the enjoyment of the end result. My own private coronation. My usurping of Thor’s birthright. I was born to be King and Kingdom be damned I will ascend to a throne.

But I could not have predicted the revelation of my heritage, or foreseen the pitiful stripping of my foster brother’s purpose. This puzzled me, Thor with all his brawn could not have known the consequences of his impetuous actions nor I the cause of his ridiculous and so predictable posturing. I have come to rely on this impulsivity; it is the stuff from which I fashion the tools of his predicaments. But I could not discern behind that shifting curtain the rage of the Allfather, the punishment meted, the descent into the Odinsleep and my lonely rule. I had imagined, longed for, moved towards, a more public humiliation and acrimonious accusation. And tearful recognition of my superiority. Yes, I had wanted recognition. And tears and rending of hair and bowed backs.

What I could not have ever known is that when Odin cast Thor out in the names of all the fathers of the fathers of the sons I would feel his words as though a heart-hungry, cunning blade slipped between my ribs.

***

Two days pass. The sanctity of the casket compromised. Jotunheim breached. My lineage revealed. Thor banished. Allfather in the Odinsleep.

And I crowned with my own horned helm.

Such a small span of time and yet each moment seemingly filled to overflowing, the tankard of frothy mead, spilling over the sides, wetting the ground. Drunk with grief, with possibilities, with power, with loneliness.

“Why are you weeping?” I roared at Frigga, at Sif, at Heimdell. “I will not stand for this. Decease at once.” I turned away from each of them and whispered under my freezing breath, “And kneel.”

Crown me! And kneel. And let me be the one to lift Mjolnir to my lips.

***

Frigga would not leave Odin’s bedside. She would not leave me alone with Father. Perhaps she feared I would drown him in my tears. Smother him with my fatigued body. Brain him with my crowned brow. Together she and I sat silent and weary. Wary of one another’s presence. She wanted to comfort him and I wanted something else.

I wanted to confess.

***

Father the Disciplinarian. Father the Audience. My Allfather. King of kings. And I a prince. But not of this Kingdom.

Nearly all my life my stomach has gnawed with emptiness, burnt by a kind of starvation. Father hunger.

Feed me mine Father.

***

The dark-souled prince and the royal future king filled with light. The two of us locked into lifetimes of broken brotherhood. The fine line between love and hate a battleground upon which we meet. Again and again. And yet again. Where is the father when the sons tear at one another, bleeding blue and red upon the white mantle of power.

I never wanted the throne. I wanted to be your equal, Brother. I wanted to be worthy of it, Father.

***

God and Devil. Sin of the north. The evilness of Giants and me their begotten. Spawned prince, discarded son of Kings. Loki Laufeyson who was sentenced by Prophecy before my birth. If I could roar at the unfairness of this I would but alas I have been silenced by poisoned honey, fed until full of lies bred from fear. What have they made of me? How they have shaped the shifter by their own desires and their own aversion and their own dread. In such a despicable molding what have I become?

What runs in my own veins, what cowers in the chambers of my heart? Where is the strength that is my birthright? Where is the cunning magic of which I have earned every spell and deception?

Hear this now, see this now. I am rising; I am rising from the fire and the ice.

***

The hours I spent upon the throne I dallied between daydreaming and riding the nightmare through my unconsciousness.

***

_There is a key and I reach for it. My fingers feed into my open mouth, my hand snakes down my throat, fishing for that which would release the latch. I feel it, the hardened edges of it, just there, fingertips brushing and with pincer grip I grasp it and pull it free of my body. In the palm of my hand it crystallizes into ice, deep blue and pulsating as though alive. It is my heart, this key that unlocks. I shudder with the recognition and the key shivers from my hand and falls onto the floor. The cold tiles of the chamber wherein the blue casket is kept safe in its stolen state._

_It does not shatter, it falls as though heavy as Mjolnir and tears a hole through the cavern down into another realm and I fall after it. Through the rock and into the frozen heart of a fearsome world._

_In the vast jagged vista of frozen landscape I stand as though King. I have no idea where I am and yet it is as familiar to me as the blood that runs sluggish in my veins. I know this place. I open my arms and welcome myself home._

***

_We are standing beneath Yggdrasil and three women move around us pouring sand out of their hands and onto the ground. It is just before daybreak but it is dark yet and although I am always cold I am even colder in this place. Beside me Thor shivers and I wrap my arm around his shoulders. We are boys._

_“I don’t like it here,” he whispers into my ear. “I want to go home.” And I nod against his lips._

_The women have stopped their work and are looking at us. One is very old with long white hair that falls to her knees in a thin braid. One is like Mother and her braid is coiled onto the top of her head, her hair is brown. The third is young and her hair is yellow and hangs loose down her back. The oldest one holds up her bony hand and points to Thor. Beneath my arm he trembles._

_“You don’t like it here? You want to go home?” Her voice is brittle but she is not mocking him._

_He will not look at her and I turn my face fully towards the hag. Behind her head I see the first horizon line of pink as the sun is chased into the sky. I know my eyes must be filled with challenge and I surprise my own self at my lack of fear, but she ignores me and continues to talk to my brother._

_“Fear the world serpent rising out of the sea with a mouthful of poison. The end of times. Your ninth step will be the one you take into the hall of the slain.”_

_Thor begins to cry and buries his face deeper into my neck. I pat his shoulder and turn an even darker eye upon her._

_“Leave my brother alone. You’re scaring him, haggai.”_

_She begins to laugh until she is choking, gagging on whatever fate has forced down her throat. She collects herself and turns to spit on the ground at the base of the tree. She turns back to me and smiles both satisfied and sad. It is a strange expression and unnerves me._

_“What?” I demand and even I can hear the little boy stutter in my voice._

_“You will father that snake.”_

***

_We are in my kingdom but I do not recognize it as Asgard. It is a vast frozen jagged vista of blue and white. Blackness runs through it like pitch veins. Thor is beside me as is Sif beside him. We are walking and I am weary and I turn to my brother._

_“Surely we must be close. Now.”_

_He shakes his head. “Farther than ever before, I fear.”_

_Sif laughs and the sound is a menacing buzz in my ear._

***

_There is an ocean of blood and we are in a dragon boat. Thor and I. We stand at the proud prow and behind us a team of oarsmen pull hard. Ahead of us is a white cloud, the mist that is feared by all sailors navigating their way to death and glory._

_Suddenly and with no warning I am nauseated. I bend at the waist, leaning out over the edge of the boat and gag. Thor is there, strong hands on my shoulders, holding fast, comfort in his warm regard. I heave and unbelievably I vomit a writhing serpent. Up out of the depths of my guts he comes, pouring out of my mouth like scaled lies. And he descends into the blood red waves._

_Thor is horrified and takes a step back but pulls me with him as though he could save me from this. And we fall, tangled, onto the floor of the boat. He is holding me in his arms and I feel a safety that is a kind of memory that nearly wakes me from this dream._

_But then the snake erupts out of the sea, rising above us all, a terror so complete that one of the oarsmen throws himself overboard and suicides himself to a watery grave. The beast turns its viper head until it sees my brother and it strikes._

_Thor is dying, bleeding out between my fingers as I crush them to his wounds. I am frantic with horror and panic and in the dream I know that grief is my new companion._

_I never wanted him dead._

***

_I lie in the Odinsleep. Dreaming of another world, recharging my energy so that I can rule this one. I wake but am still cloaked in darkness. I begin to panic. I cannot see all that surrounds me; I only see that which is inside my own mind. I reach up to my face and find that both my eyes are gone, my fingers scrabbling deep within the empty sockets._

***

_Inside the dank dark caverns of the Black Dwarves. I step with purpose but I am afraid. The walls are close and damp. I brush away at the crumbling earth and shudder at the thought of those who would bury their dead beneath the ground. I am on a quest and I raise the torch in my hand higher, the flame hissing along the ceiling._

_Two dwarves step into the torchlight and motion to me to follow them. Thor steps up beside my shoulder, I am not alone. Together we follow and duck and step around heaving rocks and glittering ore. We come into an open place, still far below the surface, but filled with golden light. Mjolnir is there, on a pedestal, displayed as though a spoil of war. The light is emanating from the hammer. I reach for it but Thor is faster than I and he has it in his hand._

_A metalsmith pulls at my elbow, I turn and when I turn back Thor is gone and the hammer with him. I rage, tearing at my hair, plucking my own eyes from my head, pulling my tongue from my mouth._

***

Had I always known? Is that fair? Is that a fair question to the dutiful son? I had always wanted to be more, to be more to him, to Thor.

A king among kings. The son of a king. But my blood was not the blood of the Father. Stolen prince, life of lies. Lord of lies.

There is that moment when one realizes that all things are drawn to their own center.

I became the lies I had been told, they swirled at the very core of my being. All the dark and frozen parts of myself I had fought for my entire life’s time became the eclipsed sun around which I revolved. The Lord of Lies, the King of All Falsehoods, the Liesmith.

The forked tongue flicked within my mouth and my teeth rejoiced. I lied to Odin’s son, Thor. I lied to his face and I lied as he wept and I lied until I saw him break upon the wheel of my power. I reveled in it and my hands were empty.

I turned away from this brother mine. Towards the heavy goal of this journey.

Worth, how is it defined?

I sought out the hammer. Worthy? Yes, I deemed myself above Odin’s worth. My hand it did not hesitate, it did not shake, my fingers closed around the handle and I gripped it with a sense of rightness and I bent my arm.

First there was this. Recognition. To say I did not know would be a lie. But I did say I did not know. So the origin of all the lies. How could you not know that the heart of you is made of ice and that the blood it pumps is glacial. Of course you do and you would and I did and I do. Of this I must be honest with myself.

So, I could not lift the hammer. Bah. It was never meant for me. Lightning and ear-splitting thunder. No, but I could lift the casket, the blue energy that froze my blue blood, a force of nitrogen, the great equalizer, the grand destruction of Winter’s curse upon all things. I could lift that and hold it against my breast, cradle it as though a babe, the way that he held me in his own arms and chose to fulfill his own destiny. He tore me out of my world. Made me a stranger inside my own skin. Hid me from my father, told me lies that comforted him.

Who is the Lord of Lies now? Destined to failure. Allfather, you swathed me in this dark fate. Burdened me with glorious purpose. Embrace your destiny, father told us both. Again and time again. I will.

***

This is the way that it ends.

Or one of the uncountable variations on completions.

(This is not the ending that they forced upon him, the foul vile end of days that spelled eternity of damnation. The slaughtered son, the binding entrails, the drooling serpent, and the obligated wife. The treachery of the gods and goddesses.)

But the ending by which he tried the hammer and could not lift it.

This is the closing of the story of his stolen destiny, the switching of the tale half told, the rewritten culmination. The result of the untruths, the truths hidden, the lies as sweet as honey.

The ending in which he could not lift Mjolnir and instead sneered at the weapon and all it represented, turned and walked away from the beginning, stepped purposefully into the middle, and let go of the shape he had tried with all his might to shift into -

His father’s embrace had been the shape that he had longed for; within that mold he would have been shaped worthy.


End file.
